Vice President JD Vance shared the photo below of him swearing in former U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as the next U.S. Secretary of State — and according to the comments, he is “forcing” Instagram users to see it with a setup that automatically classifies any visitor to the account as a follower of the account.
Numerous people complain that they have been opted-in as VP Vance followers despite not choosing to follow; others complain that despite attempts to actively unfollow the account, they are still seeing Vance content in their feeds.
[NOTE: The VP Vance account launched on Monday, Inauguration Day: four posts later and the account had amassed more than 15 million followers, growth that seems to support the auto-followers accusations.]
Vance is hearing protests about the automatic follow from influencers who, after all, are considered influencers precisely because they have significant follower numbers — followers who made an individual choice to follow their accounts.
Influencer Nikkolas Smith responded to Vance, writing “stop forcing follows, it’s creepy” and Lindsey McCord reported: “Unfollowed and blocked this account three times now. Getting meta to force followers? This is harassment. Pathetic.”
Celebs including singer Demi Lovato, who with more than 150 million followers knows how Instagram works, also reported being unable to unfollow Vance’s account, calling out Meta and saying the forced follow was a “shady business.”
Another commenter replied: “THIS IS MY THIRD TIME UNFOLLOWING. Y’all need to stop this.”
Some — especially parents of children on Instagram are voicing their outrage — and calling out the Trump administration’s newly close and cooperative relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, which owns Instagram.
One angry parent wrote of Vance: “Dude literally has Mark giving him followers! And in our case even used school age kids accounts to do so. You wanna really piss off America keep using my kids social medias for some weird political gains. WTH jd. Wanna explain any of this. Ad debits cause we followed the previous vp cause we didn’t.”
Meta replied to the accusation by explaining that the accounts are White House-owned accounts for the President and Vice President, and are being populated with content by the new holders of those positions. To wit, someone who was following a Kamala Harris VP account would now see Vance’s posts. There is anecdotal evidence supporting this too, to judge from the number of “I miss Kamala” comments on recent Vance posts.
Harris’s popularity then, according to Meta, is the reason for Vance’s immediately large follower number — he inherited them. (Note: Former VP Mike Pence’s contribution to the built-in audience is not mentioned.)
As for the inability to unfollow? Meta says that this aspect of free speech on the platform could “take some time.” The Meta explanation, posted on Threads, was met with vitriol, as few commenters believed Meta was experiencing technical difficulty with its “unfollow” tool.
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